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That is matching the rate of growth of government employees and their salaries. Who would of thought...

You are stunningly misinformed. In fact the percent of Americans who are public employees is the smallest it has been since 1968 [theatlantic.com] .

It makes you wonder where people get these ideas and why they feel so free to spout off without knowing anything. We have google, where is the disconnect coming from?

Fox news, Sean Hanity, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, a million Facebook posts about evil socialists taking jobs and voting Tea Party is the way out etc. Fox news is number one rated and tens of millions listen to right wing radio. They really believe that 50% of Americans all are welfare queens who make $45,000 and get free iPhones which they call Obama phones. Members of government believe the hype too which is why they are so anti Obama.

Noooooo, you hard left libby msnbc lover!!! the stupid uneducated people that bow to Obama & accept all his hand-outs, which by the way, us hard working americans are actually paying for, THEY CALL THEM OBAMA PHONES! you stupid jerk! They simply have used that stupid phrase & made it work against the terroist you call your god, "OBAMA". quit watching chris mathews & wake-up!

It seems democrats are even more afraid of brown people than republicans, they are just less likely to admit it:

Hidden Racial Anxiety in an Age of Waning Racism

That is matching the rate of growth of government employees and their salaries. Who would of thought...

You are stunningly misinformed. In fact the percent of Americans who are public employees is the smallest it has been since 1968 [theatlantic.com] .

It makes you wonder where people get these ideas and why they feel so free to spout off without knowing anything. We have google, where is the disconnect coming from?

Haha, if you live anywhere near D.C. you'd know the number of "public" employees may have decreased, but the number of people employed by the government has drastically increased in the form of "government contractors" over the last two decades.

Same overpaid, underworked government-employment lifestyle, just under the guise of "private" industry. Take a look at government contracting expenditure stats to get an idea of the magnitude.

You are stunningly misinformed. In fact the percent of Americans who are public employees is the smallest it has been since 1968 [theatlantic.com] .

It makes you wonder where people get these ideas and why they feel so free to spout off without knowing anything. We have google, where is the disconnect coming from?

This will be trolling, but you seem NOT to be foolish enough to trust what you read on the internet. However the starter comment seems as if he believes whatever he comes across, if not he believes what FauxNEWS is saying, this that comment seems like some of their 'honest and fair' reporting, and to be fair you can say that about all of the mainstream press.

That is matching the rate of growth of government employees and their salaries. Who would of thought...

You are stunningly misinformed. In fact the percent of Americans who are public employees is the smallest it has been since 1968.

It makes you wonder where people get these ideas and why they feel so free to spout off without knowing anything. We have google, where is the disconnect coming from?

Fox news, Sean Hanity, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, a million Facebook posts about evil socialists taking jobs and voting Tea Party is the way out etc. Fox news is number one rated and tens of millions listen to right wing radio. They really believe that 50% of Americans all are welfare queens who make $45,000 and get free iPhones which they call Obama phones. Members of government believe the hype too which is why they are so anti Obama.

That is matching the rate of growth of government employees and their salaries. Who would of thought...

You are stunningly misinformed. In fact the percent of Americans who are public employees is the smallest it has been since 1968.

It makes you wonder where people get these ideas and why they feel so free to spout off without knowing anything. We have google, where is the disconnect coming from?

Compaq was afraid to use AMD chips given out for free, because Intel would "retaliate", ok?
What kept AMD's market share low was not "clever marketing" of its competitor, it's crime.

Back in P4 Prescott times, Intel's more expensive, more power hungry, yet slower chip outsold AMD's 3 or 4 to 1.
Not being able to profit even when having superior products, it's really astonishing, to see AMD still afloat.

Intel's Payola [1] (which basically kept Dell profitable for several quarters of the past decade) is something you have to factor in when looking at these "deals". I'm just sad that Intel didn't pay a bigger price for their purely anticompetitive corrupt practices.

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/tec...

Thu 5/15/2014 8:48 am. In the last few months, I MP3ed about 30 gigabytes of *my* CDs -- 338 CDs -- which I started buying a few years after the thing was introduced in the US at any rate; co-shoppers still asked what they were when I bought the first few. One or two failed to digitize; 3 or four required cleaning, with hand cream. I have, however, noted *many* failures of *some* CD players to *play* them. ... And I hope they're not confusing CDRs with CDs, as the illustration at http://www.theatlantic.com/tec... suggests.... -- jgo * owenlabs.org

No, it's the CIA that's responsible, not the anti-vaxxers.

That's crazy conspiracy talk

Do you know what I love about you Basil? The plainest statement of fact by someone, if not in line with your ideology, must be attacked as whining and complaining.

It was whining and complaining. There are a myriad of government subsidies, most of which you CAN'T claim. Here's one you can claim, by simply doing the promoted actiokn of buying an EV. And yet this is the one you complain about, not all the ones you can't claim, that are orders of magnitude bigger. Not only is it whining, it's dumb whining.

So you didn't know that the oil companies are subsidized. Here's a clue, in future before you make a fool of yourself, try Google. e.g.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

http://priceofoil.org/fossil-f...

http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...

"You don't tend to see the left calling for banning guns either"

So when these guys call for bans on "assault weapons", they're not on the left or not calling for gun bans?

When NYC starts taking people's guns away, the city is not left-leaning or it's not banning any guns?

When Democrats tried to put confiscation of assult weapons into a bill in New York state, apparently they were not "on the left" and were not going for the guns?

When Democrat senator Dianne Feinstein said this about her desire to order every person in the US to turn in their guns (which only failed to happen because she could not get enough votes) she did not really mean it?

And while we're on the subject, what's with this article on the various Democrat efforts to grab/ban guns and various ways to lie to the public about it so the public will let them do it???

Who am I supposed to believe? You or my apparently lying eyes and ears? Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.... and as a corallary: those who failed to listen to tyrants as they announced their evil plans in the past, are probably too dumb to notice when the next wave plainly announce the evil they are planning.

For these reasons, disclosing vulnerabilities usually makes sense. We need these systems to be secure as much as, if not more so, than everyone else.'

Go blow that smoke up someone else's ass. If that was true then the NSA would "usually" publish the black-market zero day exploits they purchase as ammo for their Ferret Cannon exploit launching system. But they don't, ever. They just use them till someone else finds and fixes it.

Those fuckers don't need our shit to be secure at all. They don't want it to be so either. They don't even use the same networks we do for secure coms. Hell, that's what the Number Stations are all about. Every once in a while my scanner will catch one of my favorite broadcasts: Old school, just a monotonous series of digits. I'll fall asleep listening to them droning on and on -- no doubt only decipherable by one-time pads. You know, because public key crypto just moves the key-sharing problem of authentication around -- The endpoints still have to exchange the public keys, just like they'd have to exchange one-time pads (hundreds of Gigs of pad can fit in a micro SD card now). The CA system just moves the authentication problem from "which is their public key" to "which CA are they using" and adds: "Which CA can be trusted?" (none).

Look, if it was so damn important that the SSL systems were secure then the VERY BROKEN CA system would have been fixed a long time ago. As it stands now it's just a collection of single points of failure and any one compromised CA brings the whole thing down (see: Diginotar Debacle). SSL has NEVER provided security, ever. At least with pre-arranged / pre-shared keys if you do manage to transmit the key out of band (in person, at your bank, etc) no one can ever MITM the connection. All TLS / PKI did was ensure that all SSL connections had a potential MITM via the CA. No competent security researcher would design a system like that. You have American, Iranian, Turkish, Chinese, Russian, and etc. root certs trusted in your browser. If they compromise any router between you and your destination they can MITM the connection, you'll see a big green bar too. Even if you did examine the cert chain, you'd have no way to know if the endpoint switched to a new CA, since any CA can create any cert for any domain, you have to trust ALL of them.

Web security is a laughing stock, and any "black-hat" group that was relying on SSL for any coms is probably just a CIA front, because EVERYONE with any snap has known that shit is not safe since its inception. Would YOU trust a CA to sign certs if they also sell information interception services to governments? Why did you then? We already have accounts and pre-arranged secrets with all the places we need secure so just take your existing HTTP-Auth proof of knowledge hash and feed it to the damn stream cipher and you're done. Well, and remove the basic auth bullshit, that's not needed, since we have cookies and web forms already. Point being: It's trivial to fix the CA system, but they don't do so, thus it's apparent that no government wants this shit to be secure or we wouldn't have the CA system, and they all wouldn't be able to spy on us. If you ask me that's collusion with the enemy against the citizens: Treason.

I'm fully capable of reading at 1000+ words / minute and remembering the information, so next time you want to claim it can't be done, make sure you're not talking to someone who can.

If you're really a person who can do this, PLEASE volunteer for one of these studies, so we actually have some reliable evidence. Because basically every previous study on this stuff says comprehension goes significantly down as reading speed goes up.

Quite a few studies have shown this (some articles summarizing findings here, here, here, here), and the only ones that seem to ever disagree are those designed by the speed-reading course or software people. Even for professional high-volume readers and people who performed well in generic speed-reading tests showed a maximum of about 75% comprehension at 600 words/minute.

And there are loads of cognitive science studies that demonstrate why this must be so. Lots of research on eye movements during reading and the maximum possible speed they can take things in, the way our retinas work and focus, cognitive constraints on the extent and speed of our "working memory," etc.

By the time you get to your claimed speed of 1000 words/minute, I sincerely doubt you're getting anywhere close to 50% comprehension. Therefore, what you're doing is skimming, not reading.

There's nothing wrong with skimming. it's an incredibly useful skill which I really picked up in graduate school. I have used it all the time when teaching and (when preparing for class) needing to re-read an article I haven't looked at in a long time (and don't really remember) or a new article dealing with a subject I'm already familiar with. I can certainly skim at 1000 words/minute and be prepared to discuss a lot of important points of an article, but if a student queries me on something very specific, I guarantee that we'll have to slow down, I'll go back, and take a look at that specific passage. When you're already fairly familiar with the field or kind of material, you can often zoom on essential elements fairly quickly, and your comprehension rate gets higher -- but you're still not reading. And if you were reading something outside of your discipline, the comprehension would go WAY down at such speeds.

So -- sorry, but your claims to read at that speed and retain information have been debunked by many studies along with many other supporting cognitive science studies that basically show why it can't work.

If indeed you are some person with a freakish skill that you can demonstrate under controlled conditions, please volunteer for a study. Otherwise, I (and any other reasonable person here) should assume that what you're actually doing at 1000 words/minute is skimming, and you're probably only getting a small fraction of the total information.

Suppose the US was at war with Country X. Men with guns attacked a US military base in Country X. The US troops fire back, killing the forces of Country X. But aha! One of the enemy was actually a US citizen! So does that mean the US troops cannot shoot at that one person?

Suppose...there was a relevant analogy here. Because none of the people being assassinated are killed on the battlefield - that's why they're assassinations. Markets, weddings, apartment buildings...those are the sites of your typical drone strikes, where people are minding their own business. Not in a firefight with Marines or plotting the next strike with the Legion of Doom. Like Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, who was blown up at a cafe with his cousin because he was born to the wrong father.

Why is it okay to target non-US citizens with drones, but not US citizens? Why is it okay to shoot them, but not with drones?

It's not that it's "okay", it's that the Constitution provides greater protections for citizens than for non-citizens. But even for non-citizens, it's not okay to target them with signature strikes, where we don't even know who we're killing,

None of this is new. Start here to get your feet wet. Continue on at the Guardian, and finally to the presdent day. If that's too tl;dr, just know that the USG didn't stop being full of shit at every level with the invasion of Iraq. That if a "senior administration official" tells you that water is wet, you just might want to verify their claims.

Suppose the US was at war with Country X. Men with guns attacked a US military base in Country X. The US troops fire back, killing the forces of Country X. But aha! One of the enemy was actually a US citizen! So does that mean the US troops cannot shoot at that one person?

Suppose...there was a relevant analogy here. Because none of the people being assassinated are killed on the battlefield - that's why they're assassinations. Markets, weddings, apartment buildings...those are the sites of your typical drone strikes, where people are minding their own business. Not in a firefight with Marines or plotting the next strike with the Legion of Doom. Like Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, who was blown up at a cafe with his cousin because he was born to the wrong father.

Why is it okay to target non-US citizens with drones, but not US citizens? Why is it okay to shoot them, but not with drones?

It's not that it's "okay", it's that the Constitution provides greater protections for citizens than for non-citizens. But even for non-citizens, it's not okay to target them with signature strikes, where we don't even know who we're killing,

None of this is new. Start here to get your feet wet. Continue on at the Guardian, and finally to the presdent day. If that's too tl;dr, just know that the USG didn't stop being full of shit at every level with the invasion of Iraq. That if a "senior administration official" tells you that water is wet, you just might want to verify their claims.

Let us project this trend ahead to a logical, if not inevitable, outcome. The camera hound of the future wears on his forehead a lump a little larger than a walnut. It takes pictures 3 millimeters square, later to be projected or enlarged, which after all involves only a factor of 10 beyond present practice. The lens is of universal focus, down to any distance accommodated by the unaided eye, simply because it is of short focal length. There is a built-in photocell on the walnut such as we now have on at least one camera, which automatically adjusts exposure for a wide range of illumination.

Also... we're not there yet on "trails".... has a fascinating section on readers researching and building their own trails; the closest I've seen is browser bookmarks. "trails" are a different thing than pre-canned trails stitched together by authors. This captures WikiPedia pretty well (in 1945!):

Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every point of his client's interest. The physician, puzzled by a patient's reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. The chemist, struggling with the synthesis of an organic compound, has all the chemical literature before him in his laboratory, with trails following the analogies of compounds, and side trails to their physical and chemical behavior.

Let us project this trend ahead to a logical, if not inevitable, outcome. The camera hound of the future wears on his forehead a lump a little larger than a walnut. It takes pictures 3 millimeters square, later to be projected or enlarged, which after all involves only a factor of 10 beyond present practice. The lens is of universal focus, down to any distance accommodated by the unaided eye, simply because it is of short focal length. There is a built-in photocell on the walnut such as we now have on at least one camera, which automatically adjusts exposure for a wide range of illumination.

Also... we're not there yet on "trails".... has a fascinating section on readers researching and building their own trails; the closest I've seen is browser bookmarks. "trails" are a different thing than pre-canned trails stitched together by authors. This captures WikiPedia pretty well (in 1945!):

Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every point of his client's interest. The physician, puzzled by a patient's reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. The chemist, struggling with the synthesis of an organic compound, has all the chemical literature before him in his laboratory, with trails following the analogies of compounds, and side trails to their physical and chemical behavior.

If someone is homeless and living on the street, they need treatment and training, and in San Francisco there are lots of agencies providing that. It doesn't seem like a good idea to hand out money to random people on the street.

http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...

If you feel compassionate above and beyond the taxes you pay, donate to charitable organizations that provide professional help.

It's just complete nonsense, anyone working with smartphones at the time was completely unfazed by the iPhone

Oh really?

Chris DeSalvo right after the iPhone unveiling:

As a consumer I was blown away. I wanted one immediately. But as a Google engineer, I thought ‘We’re going to have to start over.’

What we had suddenly looked just so . . . nineties,” DeSalvo said. “It’s just one of those things that are obvious when you see it.

Andy Rubin after the iPhone unveiling:

"Holy crap," he said to one of his colleagues in the car. “I guess we’re not going to ship that phone."

Yeah, they were totally unfazed. Oh wait...

http://theatlantic.com/technol...

People can hear music, and the love it.

http://www.theatlantic.com/tec...

" I constantly hear Gregorian chants. "
That is no tinnitus. It's an auditory hallucination.

Maybe you should talk to people about this who aren't crazy?

I didn't say there was a signed treaty about NATO expansion. This new article from the Atlantic looks like a fair primer.
http://www.theatlantic.com/int...

The thing is, your position is that since Russia is not legitimate they don't have legitimate concerns, therefore, whenever they push back it's for no good reason at all. My position is slightly different. Let's take the ultimate hellhole North Korea: my take is that their aggressive posturing is not only for internal use. It's also based on legitimate concerns about US/South Korean aggressive posturing.
In the case of Russia, there's quite a difference between 'owning' the ex-soviet states and having legitimate concerns about NATO creeping up to them. The US has an official policy that if anyone tries something like that in South America, they've got war on their hands. So in part the conflict comes down to this: is the US going to recognize that Russia has legitimate security concerns or not? I tend towards recognizing those concerns. It doesn't mean one has to be nice about it though.

"Swartz was not an asshole, he was however a moron, who let occupioer types convince him that just because you protest, you cannot be arrested for your protests", by MouseTheLuckyDog

"The prosecution of Aaron Swartz was motivated, in part, by the 2008 “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto” the internet activist had penned advocating for civil disobedience against copyright law, Swartz’s attorney confirmed Friday." ref

"A reluctant witness's account of a Federal prosecution. If you haven't been following the case, start with the editor's note for context. ref

I'm well aware of the whisky rebellion, the people involved were really concerned about being able to make and market whisky, their resistance was little more than illegal brigandage. So yeah, they weren't concerned about "singers or actors," they were too busy beating people up for trying to enforce a law. The average whisky rebel's motivations would be easily recognizable to the average confederate soldier.

Is the Whisky Rebellion really your sine qua non of an enlightened citizenry defending its rights? Sit-Down Strike much? Or Nat Turner's Slave Rebellion? These are people that were fighting for real rights, their livelihoods, their liberty and their lives, as opposed to mouthing empty-headed platitudes in order to get out of paying a tariff.

Shield laws mean that professional (read: attached to a major news organization) journalists will always be more legitimate than bloggers, as they have legal protections that bloggers can only dream about.

Not according to the 9th Circuit Court. Bloggers are journalists, according to that ruling.

Everybody is jumping on the horribleness of the proposal, nobody seems to be catching the very obvious: it's the wrong topic for a prison reformer.

I have to skim a lot of headlines myself - just reading the 1 sentence about the 4-year-old gives me willies; for all my liberal values and intellectual knowledge about death penalty as a surprisingly poor deterrent, I want evil vengeance on such animals myself. But it's folly to obsess on these cases, and this lady has terrible priorities.

We have very few needs for more awful punishments; while these disgusting cases do come up, they're very, very rare compared to the millions of less-serious crimes that cost the state huge sums to punish with current prisons.

If you want a great slashdot techie solution, you'll love this article in The Atlantic:
http://www.theatlantic.com/mag...

from a few years back about "imprisonment" with heavy use of the ankle-trackers that rule over your life. It points out that most of the people who commit most of the crimes that have the US prison system so huge are people with poor impulse control, bad habits, and bad companions. The ankle tracker can be configured to let them go to work, go home, not be off-path for more than minutes without police response, and importantly, out of the bars and the wrong parts of town. For quite a lot of the prison population, they could be paying a few payroll taxes that compensate for their $4K costs of monitoring and parole, instead of costing us as much as keeping a kid in Harvard (nearly every prisoner is $50K/year).

We may already be unaware that simple solitary confinement is something like the time-dilation drug, that it constitutes torture in its own right:
http://www.newyorker.com/repor... ...torture that reduced Hezbollah hostage Terry Anderson to methodically smashing his head into a wall in a suicide attempt after about 18 solid months of it. He spent 7 years as a hostage in total, and could describe his mind slipping away every time they took him away from other prisoners and subjected him to solitary. John McCain wrote :
                  “It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment.” And this comes from a man who was
                    beaten regularly; denied adequate medical treatment for two broken arms, a broken leg, and chronic dysentery; and tortured to the point of
                    having an arm broken again.

So we're already doing THAT. It's horrible enough for about 99.999% of the worst of the worst. Can we focus on something cheaper and actually more effective for about 50% of the least of the worst and save a few dozen billion a year?

See also my essay: http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-j...
----
About a book by Jeff Schmidt, a previous editor of Physics Today magazine:
http://www.disciplined-minds.c...

"In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline"."
From Marcia Angell:
http://www.nybooks.com/article...

"The problems I've discussed are not limited to psychiatry, although they reach their most florid form there. Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine."
From the Atlantic from a few years ago:
"The Kept University"
http://www.theatlantic.com/pas...

"Commercially sponsored research is putting at risk the paramount value of higher education -- disinterested inquiry. Even more alarming, the authors argue, universities themselves are behaving more and more like for-profit companies..."
Also from the Atlantic, just recently:
"Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science"
http://www.theatlantic.com/mag...

"Much of what medical researchers conclude in their studies is misleading, exaggerated, or flat-out wrong. So why are doctors -- to a striking extent -- still drawing upon misinformation in their everyday practice? Dr. John Ioannidis has spent his career challenging his peers by exposing their bad science."
---

Or where US medicine began to go greatly wrong a century ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
"When Flexner researched his report, "modern" medicine faced vigorous competition from several quarters, including osteopathic medicine, chiropractic medicine, electrotherapy, eclectic medicine, naturopathy and homeopathy.[11] Flexner clearly doubted the scientific validity of all forms of medicine other than that based on scientific research, deeming any approach to medicine that did not advocate the use of treatments such as vaccines to prevent and cure illness as tantamount to quackery and charlatanism. Medical schools that offered training in various disciplines including electromagnetic field therapy, phototherapy, eclectic medicine, physiomedicalism, naturopathy, and homeopathy, were told either to drop these courses from their curriculum or lose their accreditation and underwriting support. A few schools resisted for a time, but eventually all complied with the Report or shut their doors."

Article has been gutted somewhat like many Wikipedia medicine articles. It used to have stuff on how women and minorities had also been disenfranchised by that takeover, so that only rich white guys who could afford college could practice medicine.

Anyway, I may not agree 100% with all your points, an

See also my essay: http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-j...
----
About a book by Jeff Schmidt, a previous editor of Physics Today magazine:
http://www.disciplined-minds.c...

"In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline"."
From Marcia Angell:
http://www.nybooks.com/article...

"The problems I've discussed are not limited to psychiatry, although they reach their most florid form there. Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine."
From the Atlantic from a few years ago:
"The Kept University"
http://www.theatlantic.com/pas...

"Commercially sponsored research is putting at risk the paramount value of higher education -- disinterested inquiry. Even more alarming, the authors argue, universities themselves are behaving more and more like for-profit companies..."
Also from the Atlantic, just recently:
"Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science"
http://www.theatlantic.com/mag...

"Much of what medical researchers conclude in their studies is misleading, exaggerated, or flat-out wrong. So why are doctors -- to a striking extent -- still drawing upon misinformation in their everyday practice? Dr. John Ioannidis has spent his career challenging his peers by exposing their bad science."
---

Or where US medicine began to go greatly wrong a century ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
"When Flexner researched his report, "modern" medicine faced vigorous competition from several quarters, including osteopathic medicine, chiropractic medicine, electrotherapy, eclectic medicine, naturopathy and homeopathy.[11] Flexner clearly doubted the scientific validity of all forms of medicine other than that based on scientific research, deeming any approach to medicine that did not advocate the use of treatments such as vaccines to prevent and cure illness as tantamount to quackery and charlatanism. Medical schools that offered training in various disciplines including electromagnetic field therapy, phototherapy, eclectic medicine, physiomedicalism, naturopathy, and homeopathy, were told either to drop these courses from their curriculum or lose their accreditation and underwriting support. A few schools resisted for a time, but eventually all complied with the Report or shut their doors."

Article has been gutted somewhat like many Wikipedia medicine articles. It used to have stuff on how women and minorities had also been disenfranchised by that takeover, so that only rich white guys who could afford college could practice medicine.

Anyway, I may not agree 100% with all your points, an

"The US economy is rapidly splitting in two, into a blue-collar/lower education economy where unemployment is high and job prospects are low; and a white-collar/higher education economy where unemployment is low and that's where all the growth is happening (tech, finance, etc.)"

I agree the first one is not coming back, but as I see it, the second one is mostly going away too. To over-simplify, robotics eliminated blue collar jobs, but AI eliminates white collar jobs. A "basic income" is one solution to this. Below is a further elaboration on that theme.

Blue collar jobs making and mending things (and some "pink collar" service jobs like massage, hair cutting, bartending, nursing, and waitressing) are eliminated (or greatly reduced) by robotics and similar automation that can recognize and manipulate physical things (or empower one person to do more, like a powered exoskeleton or semi-autonomous welding rigs requiring only partial supervision). Better design of tools and products (including eventually 3D printing) also reduce such jobs by making "DIY" easier or making products that last longer or are easier to assemble and install yourself (like "John Guest" plumbing connections that press together).

White collar jobs and some other "service jobs" (like librarians, accountants, insurance agents, travel agents, system administrators, managers, teachers, radiologists, telemarketers, telephone-based support positions) are eliminated by AI and lesser programs that can recognize and manipulate information, or at least amplify the ability of an individual to "Do it yourself" like tax software. Again, even if they don't replace such jobs, they can empower one person to do what used to take dozens of people.

There is some overlap because most jobs in practice have a variety of aspects. Radiologists work mostly with visual patterns, for example, so software for robot vision is affecting them. Hair styling requires creative application of general principles to an individual with a certain shape of head and character of hair, so AI may be an important aspect for planing overall strategy. Improved telephone support may require recognizing human speech and holding a conversation.

So, the value of hiring a human for any job is going to diminish over time as robotics, AI, ad other automation improves. We saw that first in agriculture (in the USA, going from 90% of employment to 2% over two centuries while output grows, although gardening remains a popular hobby). Now we are seeing it in manufacturing (in the USA, going from about 35% to 15% over 50 years and still falling while output grows, and while the hobby maker movement rises). We will see that with white color jobs too. That is why we need a healthy mix of basic income, an expanded gift economy, improved subsistence, and more participatory democratic government planning.

By the way, it is true the USA imports more and more manufactured goods like from China. However, the smaller national US workforce still produces more than ever as well. The USA may bring those manufacturing back from China, but there will not be significantly more jobs from it because such jobs will be automated. Steve Jobs said this about Apple's manufacturing for example. The choice is between using humans acting like robots for pay in China (and shipping costs etc.) versus using real robots in the USA. Even China is automating to reduce labor costs. More discussion:
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...

Other issues make this worse, such as ultimately limited demand for most goods and services with a law of diminishing returns, as well as money supply issues as most money moves to a mostly zero-sum FIRE sector casino economy concentrated in fewer and fewer hands and away from most human

"The US economy is rapidly splitting in two, into a blue-collar/lower education economy where unemployment is high and job prospects are low; and a white-collar/higher education economy where unemployment is low and that's where all the growth is happening (tech, finance, etc.)"

I agree the first one is not coming back, but as I see it, the second one is mostly going away too. To over-simplify, robotics eliminated blue collar jobs, but AI eliminates white collar jobs. A "basic income" is one solution to this. Below is a further elaboration on that theme.

Blue collar jobs making and mending things (and some "pink collar" service jobs like massage, hair cutting, bartending, nursing, and waitressing) are eliminated (or greatly reduced) by robotics and similar automation that can recognize and manipulate physical things (or empower one person to do more, like a powered exoskeleton or semi-autonomous welding rigs requiring only partial supervision). Better design of tools and products (including eventually 3D printing) also reduce such jobs by making "DIY" easier or making products that last longer or are easier to assemble and install yourself (like "John Guest" plumbing connections that press together).

White collar jobs and some other "service jobs" (like librarians, accountants, insurance agents, travel agents, system administrators, managers, teachers, radiologists, telemarketers, telephone-based support positions) are eliminated by AI and lesser programs that can recognize and manipulate information, or at least amplify the ability of an individual to "Do it yourself" like tax software. Again, even if they don't replace such jobs, they can empower one person to do what used to take dozens of people.

There is some overlap because most jobs in practice have a variety of aspects. Radiologists work mostly with visual patterns, for example, so software for robot vision is affecting them. Hair styling requires creative application of general principles to an individual with a certain shape of head and character of hair, so AI may be an important aspect for planing overall strategy. Improved telephone support may require recognizing human speech and holding a conversation.

So, the value of hiring a human for any job is going to diminish over time as robotics, AI, ad other automation improves. We saw that first in agriculture (in the USA, going from 90% of employment to 2% over two centuries while output grows, although gardening remains a popular hobby). Now we are seeing it in manufacturing (in the USA, going from about 35% to 15% over 50 years and still falling while output grows, and while the hobby maker movement rises). We will see that with white color jobs too. That is why we need a healthy mix of basic income, an expanded gift economy, improved subsistence, and more participatory democratic government planning.

By the way, it is true the USA imports more and more manufactured goods like from China. However, the smaller national US workforce still produces more than ever as well. The USA may bring those manufacturing back from China, but there will not be significantly more jobs from it because such jobs will be automated. Steve Jobs said this about Apple's manufacturing for example. The choice is between using humans acting like robots for pay in China (and shipping costs etc.) versus using real robots in the USA. Even China is automating to reduce labor costs. More discussion:
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...

Other issues make this worse, such as ultimately limited demand for most goods and services with a law of diminishing returns, as well as money supply issues as most money moves to a mostly zero-sum FIRE sector casino economy concentrated in fewer and fewer hands and away from most human

The Harvard study they relied on? It's crap. Note that even your link only claimed 57%. I would dispute whether that qualifies as a VAST majority.

The self reported figure from the study came in at 29%, which is probably a better number. The 62%, and even the 57% in your link rely on a very broad definition of medical bankruptcy. Some with $500,000 in other debt and $5,001 in medical debt shouldn't really count as a medical bankruptcy.

"who could help cure cancer"

PhDs in the life sciences are more likely to be unemployed than employed at the time of graduation, and the trend is only getting worse

Why would a medical research lab hire some random coder to cure cancer, when PhDs in biology can't even find jobs?

Why would they hire a PhD in biology to cure cancer, for that matter?

Where's the monetary value in curing something, when you can treat it as a chronic condition and make lots of money doing so? So yeah, they'd hire the PhD to *treat* cancer, but it the dumbass actually cured it, they'd be buried in an unmarked grave in a field of GMO wheat faster than you can say "Monsanto".

"who could help cure cancer"

PhDs in the life sciences are more likely to be unemployed than employed at the time of graduation, and the trend is only getting worse

Why would a medical research lab hire some random coder to cure cancer, when PhDs in biology can't even find jobs?

Companies are sitting on an historically mammoth pile of cash (in general) :
https://www.stlouisfed.org/pub...
http://www.dailyfinance.com/on...
http://bgr.com/2013/10/02/appl...
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...

Why are they being so stingy?

They have realized that it is far more profitable to invest in CONGRESSMEN, than it is to invest in their own labor-pool.

First, thank you, everyone, for the feedback. There are some wonderful stories that I recognize and others that I look forward to reading.

Second, because the solicited essays and fiction will only be a small part of the course, I will have to rely on short stories (including novellas) instead of entire novels. That is part of what makes it hard to research. It's much easier to find out about novels, which have more readers and are better publicized than short stories, especially recent ones that have not yet been widely reprinted.

Third, to those of you who think I am being too lazy to do my research myself, gathering information is part of the research process, and I'd be remiss in not making use of the hive mind if it has useful information that I might not. I would much rather be called a negligent teacher than to be one. Academics study one another's reading lists and syllabi all the time. Believe me, plenty of work remains in deciding what material to include, how present it, etc.

Fourth, thank you for letting me know the history of the word "futurism". The sense I used it ("concern with events and trends of the future or which anticipate the future") is the first one in some dictionaries and is widely used at kurzweilai.net, The Foresight Institute, and other sites I have used, but I will certainly let my students know that some people prefer the word "futurology". For those who are interested, here's a Google n-gram view of "futurism", "futurist", and "futurology".

Fifth, some commenters suggested using primary sources and biography. Agreed. I was already planning to include Turing's Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Vannevar Bush's As We May Think, and the stories of Khan Academy, Iqbal Quadir, Sugata Mitra, and others.

Sixth, it was also suggested that I look at past predictions of the future. Also agreed. I assembled such a reading list for a previous course. It hadn't occurred to me to include in my question what I didn't need, because I'd already assembled it, but I see now that it would be helpful.

Thank you again for the suggestions and even for the criticisms. Soliciting opinions from Slashdot is always a story in itself.

“A new image of urban America is in the making,” HuffPo quotes William H. Frey, a demographer at Brookings who co-wrote the report, as saying. “What used to be white flight to the suburbs is turning into ‘bright flight’ to cities that have become magnets for aspiring young adults who see access to knowledge-based jobs, public transportation and a new city ambiance as an attraction.”

And recently, it has started to become the norm, not just a trend amongst young.
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/05/23/18441345-urban-renewal-census-figures-show-cities-surging?lite

Big cities surpassed the rate of growth of their surrounding suburbs at an even faster clip, a sign of America's continuing preference for urban living after the economic downturn quelled enthusiasm for less-crowded expanses.

And, the trend lines up with the younger crowd driving & buying cars less.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/03/why-dont-young-americans-buy-cars/255001/
http://cars.chicagotribune.com/fuel-efficient/news/chi-cars-get-older-young-people-drive-less-20130807

The Times notes that less than half of potential drivers age 19 or younger had a license in 2008, down from nearly two-thirds in 1998. The fraction of 20-to-24-year-olds with a license has also dropped. And according to CNW research, adults between the ages of 21 and 34 buy just 27 percent of all new vehicles sold in America, a far cry from the peak of 38 percent in 1985.

Second, nowhere in the article does he mention New York. He is an urban planner from New York, yes, but he was specifically talking about the tech companies in the Bay Area bussing employees from the city to the suburbs. He's not pushing anything for New York. He's an urban planner talking about planning in an urban area other than the one he is in.

The summary reminds me of JFK and of this indirectly related article The Double Standard That Lets Elites Survive Even Catastrophic Failures:

To be taken seriously, those who critique the powerful must be flawless, whereas society forgives the most egregious errors in judgment of the elites themselves.

It is the height of arrogance to think that US law applies OUTSIDE the sovereign territory of the USA.

That I agree with, like when our government takes it upon itself to extra-judicially murder an entire family during a wedding

'Cuz that's what you meant, right?

So true. But DNA security is more that an issue of privacy. In the near future, understanding the human genome will make possible developing bioweapons targeted at individuals (with collateral damage) as well as bioweapons that could probably kill all humans exposed to the pathogen (like Ebola). We have, up to now, been protected by the obscurity and complexity of the issue. With advanced computers, vast data collection, and improved scientific understanding, creating individual and global bioweapons will become college-level biochemistry. Maybe not this decade, but probably within several decades (my guesstimate). In that sense, the movie GATTACA was a utopian fantasy, because people did not live in fear of apocalypse every day given everyone's DNA was known precisely and used for identification.

For current trends, consider recent US government activities (but other countries might do it too):
"U.S. Chases Foreign Leaders' DNA, WikiLeaks Shows"
http://www.wired.com/dangerroo...
"State Department representatives didn't immediately respond to questions about why diplomats need to acquire DNA and other biometric data on foreigners, what State does with any biometric information it gets, or how long the department retains it."

And also:
http://www.theatlantic.com/mag...
"The U.S. government is surreptitiously collecting the DNA of world leaders, and is reportedly protecting that of Barack Obama. Decoded, these genetic blueprints could provide compromising information. In the not-too-distant future, they may provide something more as well--the basis for the creation of personalized bioweapons that could take down a president and leave no trace. "

Unlike private encryption keys for a computer system, or a lock and key for your front door, you can't easily change your DNA if someone else gets a sample of it (like from a used drinking glass). In fact, so far, you can't significantly change your DNA at all. And the fact is, probably almost every citizen in the Western world already has taken some kind of medical test where potentially, if archived, their specific DNA would be available. So, we are probably already all compromised..

So, sadly, this trend towards increased genetic understanding may eventually mean the end of human day-to-day living as we know it in the near future (if not actual life). Individually targeted weapons are actually a lesser worry. Imagine a vast plague launched by some genetic-script kiddy showing off how "1eet" they are. Imagine a flu season where just everyone who gets it dies a few weeks after seemingly getting well -- and where everyone gets it. Or imagine perhaps 10 bad flu seasons in a row year after year, each with 30% mortality like the black plague.

Remember, unlike computer viruses, you can't right now just issue a patch for human DNA. And even if you could, the patch itself might be deadly. So avoidance may be the only option if the virus has been specifically designed to target some newly discovered human weakness in all human DNA.

Of course, we face similar risks in theory with nanotechnology, and groups like the Foresight Institute have discussed them. But, nanotechnology in the form of sophisticated mobile nanobots is still theoretical. Biotechnology and disease is a reality of our every day lives.

Preventing this risk of a 100% fatal designer plague would probably mean changing large aspects of how we live. This might include living in air-tight Biosphere-II-like structures and/or space habitats. Could it be that human tribalism and sparring at borders had evolutionary adaptive value to keep tribes mostly isolated to prevent disease transmission? Perhaps things might even go so far as never being in the physical presence of another human being and never receiving a physical object including food from outside your enclosure (

That appears to be well above the Norwegian minimum wage and yet McDonald's remains a viable business in Norway. That should be an informative data point for those who believe raising the minimum wage will destroy industries. It has some effect on prices, for sure, but when all businesses in the industry are in the same situation it still works. Further, you eliminate the underclass who now have more disposable income to spend.

Here's an interesting article on how McDonald's functions under high minimum wage conditions.

I am not a fan of professional sports but at least the NFL/NHL/NBA etc. pay their way. Their athletes are well paid and they do not burden the host cities with the cost of their facilities - generally speaking.

Au contrare : The NFL pays no taxes (by law). The stadiums are financed by public bonds, and the teams pay them back at a lower interest than on US Treasury Bonds. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/10/how-the-nfl-fleeces-taxpayers/309448/

This has got to be the ultimate 'think of the children' post. If, indeed they could think.

Perhaps this isn't so far fetched after all. It would explain the recent observation about the depressing number of Americans who think that Astrology is a science. And the depressing number of Americans who aren't aware that the earth revolves around the sun.

It's somebody elses fault.

The story of al-Awalaki's 16 year old son doesn't get enough coverage. Presumably, he's one of the 4 americans that have been (officially) killed by drone strikes.

Obama's campaign staff said that the boy should've "had a more responsible father."

http://www.theatlantic.com/pol...

I dont ubnderstand why you blame Obama. He promised change, and he changed. Today, is is probably the most dedicated child-killer ouside the middle east or mental institutions.

The story of al-Awalaki's 16 year old son doesn't get enough coverage. Presumably, he's one of the 4 americans that have been (officially) killed by drone strikes.

Obama's campaign staff said that the boy should've "had a more responsible father."

http://www.theatlantic.com/pol...

These charter-school folks have a long-term agenda, and that is the conversion of public education from a public service to a fully privatized profit center, with the added perk of eliminating teachers unions as a political force. A key factor in achieving this is that wealth inequality has become so extreme that local governments no longer have the resources to educate the nation's children, but billionaires do.

Local governments have plenty of resources to educate the nation's children. The U.S. spends more on education per student than any other country in the world. K-6 spending is 4th highest in the world, 7-12 is 5th highest (both about 40% more than the OECD average), and post-HS spending is highest in the world. The result of all this spending? Performance at or below the OECD average.

The problem isn't lack of money. The schools are completely awash in it.

Pre-hacked software!

if ( strcmp( cmd, CMD_INNOCUOUS ) == 0 && user = root ) {
// On innocuous command, Set the user to root.
}
...
printf( pattern, arg1, arg2, etc ); // Where pattern string can be modified by some user action.

// Return pointer on stack may be smashed now, code below may or may not ever run depending on exploit.

In all seriousness, the code will need a huge audit before I'd use it. If any of it requires a special compiler then it's garbage (can't trust the compiler, as Ken Thompson showed). Even if obvious exploits are eliminated, it could still create a series of machine states that trigger firmware or microcode backdoors, etc. True, if your hardware is fucked you've got bigger problems, but what you fail to realize is that above espionage the malware tries even harder to remain undetected, so even if pervasively installed they must be triggered selectively and discreetly. The point isn't to wear a tinfoil hat; The point is why even risk it when there are alternatives?

TL;DR: Is was secret, it is unsafe.

Here you MIT idiots go: This is where the cyber-weapons are. The same place all the other weapons are. The Black Fucking Market. What morons, get real.

... fire in a crowded theater and all that. That's not just an expression, it was actually used by a justice in a Supreme Court ruling.

And a very bad ruling, at that. Find out why.

"If... you were Holder and Obama, what sort of deal would you try to strike with everybody's favorite secrets-leaker?"

I'd offer him pardon on almost everything, leaving only a trivial (1-2 months) jail sentence left over. Then I'd have him murdered while he was in prison.

If I were Obama, this is what i would have done with Holder. He is the real traitor here.

How the NFL Fleeces Taxpayers

Taxpayers fund the stadiums, antitrust law doesn't apply to broadcast deals, the league enjoys nonprofit status, and Commissioner Roger Goodell makes $30 million a year. It's time to stop the public giveaways to America's richest sports league—and to the feudal lords who own its teams.